Proprietary and Confidential to PMC-Sierra, Inc and for its Customers
’
Internal Use
Document ID: PMC-2010146, Issue 4
69
PM2329 ClassiPI Network Classification Processor Datasheet
a second partition. Both these partitions are shown in
Figure 21
as "OC1" and "OC2" respectively.
Partitions are used when running operation cycles (OCs). An OC executes over a specific partition, and
typically all rules in a partition participate in the same kind of operation. From a software point of view, a
partition will consist of cells storing rules relating to a specific networking operation. For example, routing
rules, firewall rules, QoS rules, etc.
In general, partitions can overlap; for example, two partitions can point to the same rule space. This is
useful when multiple software contexts in a network processor access Rule Memory; partitions can then be
associated with the appropriate context. Another situation where Rule space sharing is beneficial is in
MAC address tables where the source and destination MAC addresses can be maintained in one table.
3.5 E-RAM Operation
The basic functionality of a single PM2329 or a cascade of multiple PM2329 devices can be greatly
enhanced by the addition of the Extended RAM. The E-RAM may be used for storing statistical counts,
aging, and per-connection state information. It can also be used to implement conditional sequencing of
multiple OCs. OC Sequencing is a powerful way of selectively running multiple classification operations
on a single packet.
The PM2329
’
s E-RAM interface is designed to work with or without cascading. It allows external
synchronous pipelined SRAM to be gluelessly interfaced to the PM2329. The PM2329 supports up to a
maximum of 128K word deep E-RAM, allowing up to a word per rule when using 8 cascaded PM2329
devices (128K rules). The width of the E-RAM can be decided based upon the system requirements, with
the maximum width specified by the number of cascaded PM2329 devices. A single PM2329 can interface
to a 64-bit-wide E-RAM, and each additional PM2329 in the cascade allows an additional 32 bits to be
added to the E-RAM word width, up to a maximum of 256 bits with 7 PM2329 devices in cascade.
PM2329 chip #7 (the eighth chip of a cascade) does not support an additional 32 bits of E-RAM width.
Figures in
Chapter 2
show some typical configurations using E-RAM.
3.5.1 Organization of E-RAM Words
Every E-RAM Word (E-Word) is composed of the following fields:
Further details of E-Word format and E-RAM based OC Sequencing is provided in Chapter 5.
3.6 Cascade Operation
The Cascade bus allows up to 8 PM2329 devices to work in parallel, appearing to the external processor as
a single large PM2329 chip. The 16K-rule memory size of a single PM2329 is thus expandable up to 128K
rules on 8 PM2329 devices. The rule set of an Operation Cycle (OC) can be spread across several PM2329
devices allowing greater parallelism in operation across a larger rule memory space.
Extended Memory word (E-Word)
Data Words (D-Words)
Byte Count
(32-bit)
(32-bit)
Control Word
(32 - bit)
C-Word
Packet Count
Timestamp/State
(24/8- bit)
User Defined
(32-bit)